Colin Cochrane is a Software Developer based in Victoria, BC specializing in C#, PowerShell, Web Development and DevOps.

As all good web developers know, accessibility is a very important consideration with an ever increasing proportion of the population that is old and decrepit. One of the more important accessibility features is the image alt attribute that is used to describe an image for visually impaired users. It's always nice to find a site that has accessbility in mind by providing good descriptions of an image within the alt attribute text.

This particular example has got to be the best I have ever come across, and is an inspired choice of descriptive text that makes it clear to the elderly user what shenanigans are going on within the picture.

It appears that within the past 2-3 days the popular social book-marking site del.icio.us has started blocking the major search engine spiders from crawling their site. This isn't a simple robots.txt exclusion, but rather a 404 response that is now being served based on the requesting User-Agent.

While I was doing some Photoshop work for a site of mine tonight I needed to grab some custom shapes to use to make some icons. I recalled having bookmarked a good resource for custom shapes in del.icio.us, but after searching my bookmarks using my del.icio.us add-in for Firefix, I couldn't find it, so I pulled up my browser and went to my profile page on del.icio.us to do a search. To my surprise, I was greeted with this:

After confirming I hadn't mistyped the URL, I checked out the del.icio.us homepage and found that all was fine there. However, upon trying to perform a search, I was confronted with the same 404 error, and received the same response when trying to navigate to any page other than the homepage.

At this point I was thinking that there might have been some server issues going on with del.icio.us, but that didn't line up with my Firefox add-in still showing my bookmarks. I then noticed that my User-Agent switcher add-in was active (not sending the default User-Agent header), and remembered that I had set it to switch my User-Agent to Googlebot earlier because I was checking another site earlier today to see if it was cloaking (it was).

I reset the User-Agent switcher so it was sending my normal User-Agent header and tried accessing my del.icio.us page again and I was surprised to see that it was no longer responding with a 404 error. Puzzled by this, I took a look at del.icio.us' robots.txt and found that it was disallowing Googlebot, Slurp, Teoma, and msnbot for the following:

Seeing that the robots.txt was blocking these search engine spiders, I tried accessing del.icio.us with my User-Agent switcher set to each of the disallowed User-Agents and received the same 404 response for each one. I thought that there might have been some obscure issue with the add-in that was leading to this behaviour, so I popped open Fiddler, a nifty HTTP debugging proxy that I use to sniff HTTP headers. Fiddler has a convenient feature that allows you to create HTTP requests manually, so I created a simple set of request headers and made HEAD and GET requests using the different User-Agents listed in the robots.txt. I received the same responses as before.

My interest was definitely piqued at this point. I ran a site command against del.icio.us in Google restricted to the past 24 hours and found results as fresh as 15 hours old.

Running a normal site command on del.icio.us revealed numerous results that Google had a cached version of, many of which were as fresh as only three days ago.

This evidence seems to be indicating that del.icio.us has recently started blocking the major search engine spiders from crawling their site, by way of the requesting User-Agent. Given the recent crawl dates and cache dates, it looks like this started happening within the past 2-3 days. This raises some questions as to the intentions of del.icio.us, and perhaps Yahoo! With Yahoo! recently integrating del.icio.us bookmarks into its search results this could an attempt to enhance the effectiveness of that new feature by preventing competing search engines from indexing content from del.icio.us. While Yahoo!'s Slurp bot is also blocked, it's unlikely that Yahoo! would need to crawl the content of one of its own sites, as Yahoo! actually owns del.icio.us.